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Indie Spotlight #12: Swords and Spells

Contrary to popular belief, games don't always need huge budgets and teams of hundreds of worker drones toiling away under the watchful eye of whip-wielding overlords in order to be awesome. The thriving indie development scene continues to give birth to some of the weirdest, coolest, and most innovative games around. Indie Spotlight pulls back the curtain, taking a closer look at the world of independent game developers and the magic they make.

Dungeons, Dragons, and More Dungeons

Considering the voracious pace at which the gaming industry continues to progress and innovate, it's actually refreshing these days to find someone who unflinchingly sticks to their niche of choice over the long haul. As far as indie developers go, Jeff Vogel is a bit of a rogue; he's been making the same vein of fantasy role-playing games for almost two decades now without running out of steam. Rather than succumb to pressure to adapt to changing times, Vogel's small studio, Spiderweb Software, continues to dish out helping after helping of old-school RPG adventure steeped in swords and sorcery.

"I've always been fascinated by role-playing games, ever since a friend showed me Dungeons & Dragons back in the 4th grade," says Vogel, who learned to program in BASIC and began writing his own computer RPGs a few years later. After getting fed up with studying mathematics at grad school, he took a summer off in 1994 to make his first serious game, Exile: Escape from the Pit. He released it the following year. "To my unending surprise, people started to buy it," he says. "I quit grad school and tried my hand at making games full-time a few months later. I never looked back."

At the time, many shareware games were still sold over bulletin board systems and on hand-packaged floppy disks placed on the counter in local shops. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, and Vogel made the bulk of his Exile sales through the then-obscure America Online service. It even took him months of cajoling to set up a way to accept credit card sales, because the bankers he spoke to didn't believe a small company could make money over the Internet. While it's crazy how much the technological landscape has changed since then, equally amazing is how well Spiderweb Software managed to do over the years while changing very little about its game development formula.

Vogel's earlier games featured basic 2D sprites until the release of Nethergate, which switched over to an updated isometric perspective that's become a prevalent aspect of every game he's released since. Flagship Spiderweb Software titles like the Geneforge series and both Avernum trilogies all contain a similar style and presentation, though the story, characters, and gameplay ideas shift throughout each adventure. "My goal starting out was the same as now: to make a good living and keep writing games," Vogel explains. "We've never tried to get big and write titles with serious budgets. We write modest, old-school RPGs for a small-but-dedicated group of fans, and it works extremely well for us."

It's disappointing to see developers continually pushing further away from crafting the kind of hardcore RPGs he loves to play, but Vogel admits it's good for his own business. Indie developers have the freedom to make games for underserved niches, and a solid customer base of fans eagerly waits to grab each new installment Spiderweb Software serves up. Aside from his love of the genre, Vogel has another reason for sticking to what he knows. With a well-established fanbase and identity built around these games, suddenly switching to another genre could be catastrophic. "It's good that I love RPGs, because doing something else could very easily put us out of business," he says.

The studio recently released its latest project, Avadon: The Black Fortress, which is the first entry in a new trilogy. The game is doing well critically and sales-wise, and Vogel plans to spend the next few years writing more games in the Avadon storyline. Beyond that, he also plans to revisit and rewrite Spiderweb's oldest and most successful series, the Avernum trilogy, to give it a modern update and let newcomers enjoy it on the latest hardware.

The indie game development landscape has undergone a major shift since Vogel first got into the business, and he's encouraged by the creativity and success stories out there in the industry. "These days, it seems like every week, you read about some new indie that broke out and made a huge ton of money. When I started, writing shareware was considered a fast and efficient route straight to oblivion," he says. "I never dreamed that writing indie games would eventually be considered admirable."

Nathan Meunier is a freelance writer and indie gaming enthusiast who likes his pixels jaggy and his tunes blippy. He writes about videogames and geek/gaming culture for GameSpy, IGN, Nintendo Power, GamePro, and many other fine publications. See what he's up to at NathanMeunier.com.